Two '60s houses are models for green living
Posted on Sun, Sep. 02, 2007
BY GEORGIA TASKER
NURI VALLBONA / MIAMI HERALD STAFF
Screened doors and transoms circulate air in the great room at this Goulds house. Architect Alfred Browning Parker designed the home in 1961 for Don and Joyce Gann.
This is one in a series about living green. Next week, we explore contemporary green homes.
Forty years ago, Gwladys and Eugene Scott combined their lives and families and set out to design their dream house: a Japanese-inspired home in a South Florida hammock. It was to be without air conditioning, using salvaged pine beams, and open to the trees.
In 1961, tomato farmers Don and Joyce Gann engaged architect Alfred Browning Parker to design a home in their Goulds hammock. Because Don had sinus problems in air conditioning, the house was intended to be livable year-round without mechanical cooling or heating. Parker called it the last of his ``little houses.''
Designs from 50 years ago, such as those used by the Scotts and the Ganns, which opened homes to nature, are being reexamined today as models for green living.
Passive design for cooling was the norm for early and even mid-20th century Florida. Architects working after World War II and into the 1950s and '60s worked with a wide range of these design tools, such as building orientation, wide overhangs, strategically placed windows, clerestories and transoms.
Energy-efficient appliances, low-flow toilets and digital thermostats were unknown 50 years ago, but the designs attuned to climate go a long way toward saving resources, both natural and financial.
Electric bills clearly show the pay-off -- the Scotts average $90 a month; the Ganns, $150. More important to the couples, they preserved the native settings, a giant first green step.
''We took out one major tree, a tamarind,'' Joyce Gann said.
JUST THE BASICS
At a time when they could afford few flourishes, both couples went with basics, which have proved livable and storm-worthy.
The Scotts, who wanted the simplicity of lines in a particular Japanese palace, also admired the Quaker meeting house on Sunset Drive. Architect Marion Manley had designed it, and the Scotts contacted her. Manley was the state's first licensed woman architect. She was 75 by then, but agreed to take on the Scotts' project.
Today, the wooden home in Palmetto Bay perches on a first floor of poured concrete supports. Its second floor of pine and cypress opens on all sides to the midlevel canopies of trees. Like the Ganns' home, it has no air conditioning but uses ceiling fans and transoms to move hot air up and through the house. With the living area upstairs, air circulation is excellent, the bird songs even better.
Wooden beams used in the home are Dade County pine trees that the Scotts rescued when developers cleared tracts of land. The main beam is more than 26 feet long.
After the foundation was poured, the roof raised and the framing finished, the family -- including four of their six children -- moved in.
''That's all we could afford,'' Gwladys said. ``We had no electrical, water, walls, screens. . . . We used a ladder to climb up and down. We'd fill buckets of water for the toilet.''
Eventually, of course, the house was completed. Cypress frames the screens and glass doors; glass in the doors is tempered (shatterproof), and the ceiling is an acoustical material that also is fireproof.
The Scotts say their house is so sound, ''We didn't realize how bad Hurricane Andrew was until we opened the door.'' While they slept in the hall during the 1992 storm, the walls got soaked when the north eye wall hit, peeling back some shingles and sending one branch through a corner of the roof. Because the house can be totally opened, there was no mold or mildew after the storm, they say.
They have enclosed portions of the downstairs, adding air conditioning to Gene's small darkroom. And recently they added a waterproof coating to the peaked roof. ''It's white and we noticed a temperature difference right away,'' Gene said.
The Ganns tell a similar story of building what they could afford at the time. They even got a deal from Parker.
Joyce's uncle once lived next to Parker and had the architect design his home. Joyce told him, ''We'd love to have him design a home for us, but we can never afford him.'' Parker told the Ganns that he would be affordable because the home would be so carefully built there would be nothing purchased in excess and no waste would have to be brought to a landfill. (In Florida, construction and demolition debris accounts for 25 percent to 33 percent of the total waste produced each year.)
When the budget was used up, the house still lacked living room doors and a fireplace. So when cold set in the first year, the Ganns used plastic sheeting to try to keep the rooms warm. Doors went up the next year.
The home has three bedrooms and one bath with a central great room. Air flows east to west across the house, and Parker designed clerestory windows and screens on both sides of the house to pull air through. Because Joyce was diagnosed with arthritis at 14, she expected to one day need a wheelchair, so Parker made the doors and the hall a few inches wider than usual. The expectation was not fulfilled, but the Ganns' aging parents realized the benefits of the design.
The great room is the focus of the house, where dining takes place, where company gathers and where, with the exception of this past year when Don's mother died, a neighborhood Christmas party has taken place annually since the family moved in.
Ceiling fans throughout the house run around the clock. The fireplace is the only source of heat, ''but we have plenty of firewood,'' Joyce says. A solar heater provided hot water before Hurricane Andrew, but was not replaced after the storm. They went with an electric water heater instead.
Like the Scotts, the Ganns have air-conditioned a single room: a storeroom where they keep items that could be hurt by high humidity.
COOLING TECHNIQUE
Huge beams in the living room are hickory. Parker gave the flat roof a raised lip to hold water as a cooling technique, and the beams can bear that weight, Joyce said. In addition, the roof is bolted together. In hurricanes Andrew and Wilma, the trees leaned protectively into the house, ''Parker swore that's what they would do, and that's exactly what happened,'' Joyce says. However, because the overhang is four feet wide, one tree fell on a corner and popped it off, then crashed into the storeroom.
Unlike the Scotts' home, this one is built flat on the ground because of the possibility of Joyce's wheelchair use. Parker designed it on a ''floating foundation'' -- the center of the slab floats on soil, but is much deeper around the edges to hold it in place -- and the Ganns had to sign off with the county because of it. ''I didn't worry about flooding because the elevation here is 12 feet,'' she said.
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